My curiosity about the "pro marketeers."

Its as close as this "game" gets to actually being a game. Probably the only part I still enjoy and it allows me to supply my better half's endless need for the best possible builds.

So

Enjoyable + Domestic Harmony = win-win

The first billion is always tough.
The second billion is slightly easier.
The hundreth billion is kinda like breathing. You aren't doing a hell of a lot, it just *happens*.

I take a couple minutes whenever I log on and when I log off to clear market slots and put stuff up. The money just rolls in.

I have a tank I started less than a week ago. It's just barely level 10 and already has over 20 million in Inf. No twinking.

I've got another tank over on Triumph that cashed in on common IO crafting for a bit then parlayed that into a couple billion crafting purples. That tank hasn't hit level 15 yet.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

BlahBlahBlah...is it Tuesday night yet?!

I am not a marketeer. I once put a lot of money (well, for me) into a scheme, bit my fingernails for a week and broke a little more than even. I decided it wasn't for me.

That being said, I was very close with someone who once only farmed, for about 5 hours a day every day, and did so for 2 years. They said it relaxed them, and they ended up being the richest person I knew. They had 40 Purpled toons, and 20 of them were farmers with 5 sets of kinetic combat as well.

They told me that they loved having that much money because it meant power. They could choose out a random individual and make them happy by giving them money, they could hold huge CCs and pay people to kill others in arena; the list goes on.

A near infinite supply of what people want? I wouldn't mind having that.

I'm glad I met her though, because I gave her a new way to use her money. In the rock/paper/scissors game of PvP in CoH, I'd say it would take upwards of 20 fully purpled/PvP IOd toons (20 bill each) to be able to counter and kill everyone with at least 1 toon. That doesn't include 2v2 or other buffers or zone toons or gimmick toons etc.

In fact it would take about 800 billion (or 1 trillion) to make a full arsenal for PvP, which is probably why she only got a little more than halfway after stripping her PvE toons.

tl;dr Why? Because you can't have too much money, especially if you PvP

It's quite possible that the net effect is negligible, but it's obviously an effect.

As long as they don't put a real world dollar value on infamy and influence, I'm fine with nearly anything the Market does. But if I have to start including influence gains on my taxes? Uggh... Here comes the 1040-MMO form.

For me, some of it is helping new VIPs with a few token goodies to let them know what's out there. A stealth proc, a kismet accuracy, a kb proc, a little stack of inf to help them on their way.

But, a larger part of it is this is an MMO. I like to solo my story arcs, but for task forces and iTrials, these are with other people. I feel like if I'm going to team with someone else, I owe it to them to make my toon as well as I reasonable can.

Mind you, I'm not saying I'm going to stand by a pylon and see which attack chain is going to provide the most dps. But, I do think it's incumbent upon me as a team player to have as much defense for my toon, balanced with whatever my toon may be good at. For my blasters, I want most of them soft-capped, with no end issues and fast recharge. That doesn't mean that every player with a blaster should aim for that. The ability to make toons with the same powersets differently, and to play them differently is part of the charm of this game. But, for me, perf shifters, lotg 7.5% global recharges, miracle procs, etc - they are a part of what I, as a player owe to the team I play with. They aren't cheap. At least, they weren't, until those super-packs came out.

Every 88er does it for a different reason, or set of reasons. I don't like doing things that are too easy; I like stuff that either helps the "casual player" or doesn't actively hurt them.

That's why I kept a small buffer of midlevel salvage going for over a year. That's why I wrote a frankenslotting guide. That's why I started Midlevel Crisis and Teenage Wildlife.

That's why I decided to find good ways to destroy inf. Because everyone who farms a billion inf raises prices, in total, by ten billion inf. Everyone who destroys a billion inf lowers prices, in total, by ten billion inf.

Am I lowering prices by more than 1 part in 50,000? I don't know. But there's a good chance that I've directly destroyed more than 0.1% of the inf currently in the game, and counting indirect effects (competition between the Crazy 88s and the people we pass, contributions from base owners, contributions from generous marketeers) maybe I can take credit for 0.2% or more.

Pretty good for 0.002% of the game population.

I was, indeed, making the assumption that farmers are farming inf to spend it on the market and that everyone who sells items for inf in the market will, eventually, spend that inf in the market. I think it's a pretty solid approximation.

The 10-to-1 follows from that: if you introduce a billion into the market, you have to spend 10 billion to destroy it. Therefore a billion inf created means 10 billion of spending. If people spend 10 billion more inf on the same amount of goods, total prices have gone up by 10 billion.

To put it another way: If you add a billion to the game, almost the only way that billion will leave the game is by people spending 10 billion at the market.

Farming outside AE does generate "stuff" to go with the inf. I analyzed this based on some of TopDoc's numbers, back here and got a rough estimate of 1 "new inf" per 8 inf in the pocket of the farmer. Might be 1 in 3, might be 1 in 20.

Farming in AE generates inf almost exclusively, and at a MUCH higher rate (I don't remember where the discussion was, but it convinced me that numbers around 100M/hour are 'reasonable' .)

I am not attempting to destroy more inf than hero-merit conversions. I am not attempting to destroy more inf than astrals. I am not attempting to single-handedly lower prices by dramatic amounts. I'm just trying to do my part, maybe a little more. I may not have cancelled out even one AE farmer, but I'm pretty happy with what I've done.

From my perspective, discouraging AE farming has actually hurt the market for the most casual folks more than anything. Rare salvage was considerably cheaper before AE got nerfed into oblivion, and now people with low funds are paying sometimes more than twice as much as they used to for rare salvage. I've also noticed an increased price in many of the rare/uncommon enhancements that are easy to get through AE like Reactive Armors. When these things are generated more often, it becomes easier for more casual players to buy them for their builds. Nerfing AE has hurt the 'common folk' quite a lot from my perspective, so I guess it makes sense that a bit after that happened the converters are coming out which will overall lower prices... They're probably not going to help at all with the uncommon/rare enhancements or rare salvage though, so overall I think the AE nerfs did more harm than good.

There have been multiple events in which increased money supply was clearly correlated in time with price increases. The first was the Mastermind exploit where they were farming low-level AVs with pets which did not exemplar correctly. This produced a significant price spike on the Black Market. (This was before the market merger.) [Edit: This allowed you to inf cap your Mastermind in a matter of hours. This says to me that the inf creation rate boost was of a scale to likely be able to be globally significant to the total inf put through the market.]

The next was the AE itself. Yes, initially, the AE created a flood of both Inf and goods, because you got Inf and Tickets, and Tickets were used to produce goods. Prices of Purples, which could not be produced* in the AE skyrocketed, and everything else plummeted, because supply went through the roof. This one is not so clear, because what may have happened was that money normally spent on other goods was able to be redirected to purples.

However, this is not borne out by what followed. As waves of changes limited the number of tickets that it was easy to produce in the AE, even though extremely effective farms were still available, money production started to outpace goods production. I cannot prove this, but my experience, both in game and based on forum posts, indicate that most ticket farming was actually a side effect of PLing. People would hit the ticket cap but stay in the mission for XP. This distorted the ratio of goods produced to inf. Valuable but non-purple prices spiked. LotGs became able to be sold for 250-300M Inf on the Black Market - a situation that only subsided fully after the AE farms were clamped down much more thoroughly, the markets merged and Alignment Merits appeared.

I do not think we the players have any way to know what affect inflation is having on prices, but events like those say to me that money in circulation does affect prices.

* There was a bug for a while where Pool A (Bronze) rolls actually were able to produce purples. This was did not persist for very long, and it seems very few people knew about it.

FourSpeed: I'm going to go after one of your assumptions here.

"The observable fact that prices are not fundamentally different than they were " is not observable to me, because "a brief examination of market transactions over time" is not something I can do. I don't have a broad range of market prices for 2009, 2010, and 2011. I don't have a stockticker that goes back four years.

I _do_ have a fair variety of anecdotes, many of which show prices going up and many of which show prices going down. The plural of anecdote is not data, and many of the changes can be attributed to changes in the game. We can discuss the Rise and Fall of the Steadfast -KB; we can discuss the crash of the Luck Charm; but those are stories I can tell without any reference to "prices have gone up" or "prices have gone down."

So what do I have? I can go through a "110 million inf build" for a Blaster I did in around early 2008 and see what it would cost now. I have some notes from 7/2009 on my original inf massacre. I could look at a "40 million inf" build that I did for a Force Field defender in maybe 2008- it was before BoTZ existed- and price it out today. I don't seem to have anything really recent, though.

Would those convince you?

Here's a couple things I pulled out of the original inf massacre( 7/2009):

* I was selling LoTGs, crafted, for 80 million, and respecs for 70-90 million.
* I bought a Hecatomb for 150 million, and sold it for 250 million.
* I sold a gaussian end/red for 40 million. They've bounced around a lot, down to 20 recently, but are "usually" around 60 million.

Respecs have recently sold for 150 million inf- and are available in a couple more ways- and while I'm out of the loTG market they have been up around 100 before the super packs, haven't they? And that's something you can make in four days. Hecatombs, before the announcement of converters, were around 400-600 million inf- and those basically only came from one place. So there's some points on the high end.

On the low end, and this is anecdotal, it seems like people "round up" to 5 or 10 million inf an awful lot, on crafted IO's, these days, and will drop a million on a generic IO or 500K on a spell ink without blinking. Maybe they always did, but some people thought it was worth it to supply that market back then. Now they can't be bothered picking up pennies from the gutter.

Hell, people will spend 10 or 20 million inf on an Ultimate Inspiration. I don't think people would have thrown that kind of money around quite so fast, say, in early 2010.

One thing to consider:

The right comparison for the effect of burning, say, 100B inf, is not "what prices were like before", but "what prices would have been like with that inf still in circulation".

Prices are certainly higher than they were when I started; what we don't have direct information on is what they'd have been without large-scale destruction of inf. But simple math says that the amount of money available for things to cost is lower than it would be if there were more of it.